Crotty, Gerald Epstein and Arjun Jayadev referred to this as a growth of rentier incomes and "rentier power". They were harking back to Keynes's application of the term rentier to idle "gentlemen" who were receiving interest or dividends payments through the post for doing nothing. But now the rentiers were "mutual funds, public and private pension funds, insurance companies and other institutional investors" .ss
Costas Lapavitsas, who provided excellent factual accounts of the development of the financial crisis of 2007-8, nevertheless put the stress in explaining it on purely financial aspects-in particular the changed behaviour of the banking system, which had shifted its lending from industry to lending to individuals and reliance on new computerised technologies. He argued that the "direct exploitation" of consumers by the banks had become a major new source of surplus value and influenced the dynamics of the system.56 But this form of "exploitation", like that caused by supermarkets forcing up prices,57 is only significant in so far as workers do not fight to protect the buying power of their wages at the point of production-something unions in Britain have usually tried to achieve by demanding wage increases linked to a Retail Price Index that includes mortgage interest payments. Or, as Marx would have put it, there is only increased exploitation in so far as the capitalists who employ workers get away with buying labour power at less than its value.ss It is also worth adding that on Lapavitsas's logic it is it not only workers who are exploited by the banks but also indebted members of the capitalist class and the new middle class-the median debt of households in the US with incomes of more than \$100,000 in 2003 was about four and a half times that of households with incomes in the range of \$25,000-\$50,000.s9
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The New Age of Global Instability